28 ms·

Bitcoin Is Time

444 points by taylorwc 6y ago

personlurking 6y ago
Here's another good one (30 min read): Bitcoin is Venice https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda42070 https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda...
- gillesjacobs 6y ago
  Funny, I pinned Bitcoin more as the type to honeymoon at the Maldives. Bitcoin is a Venice, time, a Ponzi scheme, a climate disaster, digital gold, dead (x400), criminal, a bubble... The half-baked hot takes that reach the frontpage of HN are getting better and better.
tromp 6y ago
With an emission of 1 per second forever, Grin is more like time (I make the case for uncapped supply in [1]). [1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153 https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
smt88 6y ago
Isn't Bitcoin a combination of processing hardware and electricity? Time, in the human sense, seems somewhat irrelevant because humans can't/don't hash manually. Disclaimer: This site doesn't work in Firefox on Android for some reason, so I'm asking in total ignorance of the article's content.
keiferski 6y ago
Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges-and-money/ https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges-and-money/
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  Nearly any currency when used in commerce is primarily used as an IOU for time. Due how the POW is designed to ensure immutability of the blockchain it also is dependent on how cheap it is to generate energy for the people who mine. Comparing it to a bank with fiat a bank usually ensures the consistency of transactions so miners perform this action (and also developers of bitcoin if there are security holes) and your wallet is an account and bitcoin have a transaction cost which is like using a debit card associated with an account.
- 7373737373 6y ago
  > Richard Dawkins said in an offhand comment in The Selfish Gene that “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.” - https://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-theory-of-money/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-the...
  - dnautics 6y ago
    This isn't too far off from the point that David graeber makes in debt: the first 5000 years
    - kiliantics 6y ago
      I think this is a rosy-eyed view. Money is a formalised manifestation of debt, which previously was an informal system of reciprocity and altruism. But formalising this debt with financial and monetary systems destroyed the altruistic part of the arrangement. Graeber explains how money was created by states to enforce its authority and basically coerce people into participation. The anonymity of monetary debt and the fact that the system is controlled by the "powers that be" make it kind of the opposite of altruism.
      - dnautics 6y ago
        I thought that "darkness" was slyly implied in the dawkins quote
imwillofficial 6y ago
Bitcoin is time, bitcoin is love, bitcoin is life.
- moralsupply 6y ago
  Underrated comment
joshsyn 6y ago
Buying bitcoin early would have put me 10 years ahead. Missed, maybe bitcoin cash isn't bad as everyone taints it to be.
- joshsyn 6y ago
  Only a salty bitch would downvote this comment.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
joosters 6y ago
Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
- kneel 6y ago
  Negative yielding debt is literally a waste of time. Money is worth less as you move into the future. Fiat is literally a black hole.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    What percentage of assets are negative yielding? They can’t all be negative in real terms.
    - kolinko 6y ago
      All cash is, also any investment below inflation - so most bonds.
      - diab0lic 6y ago
        This motivates productive use of that capital. Deflationary currencies just guarantee the rich get richer as an axiom.
        vntok 6y ago
        > This motivates productive use of that capital. Nah. It motivates rational beings to spend that capital on anything at all, as fast as possible, because the alternative is a net loss of purchasing power. Deflationary currencies on the contrary motivate actors to think before spending, because any spending has to be balanced with the future gains that won't come from holding it and seing it accumulate value over time.
        kneel 6y ago
        The real solution exists somewhere in between an inflationary and deflationary currency. This is a balancing act.
phyro 6y ago
Thank you for sharing this! I wrote a much shorter article on why I believe Grin is the closest to "time is money" here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  How is Bitcoin's admission exponential? Isn't it a stepped linear emission?
  - tromp 6y ago
    It's inverse exponentially approaching the 21 million limit, which it can never reach [1]. [1] https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million-7263e322de1 https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-nev...
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      It's a stepped linear emission that mimics an inverse exponential emission. You can even see it in that chart if you expand it. Between the halving periods the emission is constant.
      - tromp 6y ago
        The block subsidy is constant between halvings. And is thus a step function. But "emission" refers to cumulative block subsidies. And thus is piecewise linear, with 34 pieces of exponentially decreasing slope, the last one ending up flat.
      - phyro 6y ago
        If you zoom in enough, you won't see these exponential steps. If you were able to zoom out completely, you'd see _only_ the exponential function. Bitcoin's emission is an exponential function (dropping exponentially), the fact that there is some time period between these exponential steps does not make it non-exponential. This would have been obvious if the halvings were every 30 minutes, but it's much less obvious when the "in-between step interval" is 4 years.
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
Bitcoin is entropy. Sheer wasted electricity.
- arbawk 6y ago
  You didn't read the article, did you?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    I have ahem lost more than enough time on articles about Bitcoin, and its tiresome wide-eyed fanatics. The comments are bad enough.
    - doomroot 6y ago
      Hfsp
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      And yet you found time to litter internet with you telling other people that you won't spend even little time understanding the topic at hand or posting something produced by your own thinking... That's even worse than creatively criticising the topic, that's just meaningless jibberjabber. PS let me rephrase my point: you write "I have ahem lost more than enough time on articles about Bitcoin, and its tiresome wide-eyed fanatics. The comments are bad enough." implying that you have decided for yourself that you are not wanting to spend any more time on adding meaningful things to this conversation. Who do you think is interested in this information? Why on earth would you think it's a useful thing to share (on top of that with that negative attitude that makes it painful for a normal person to read)? If you don't want to participate, just don't.
      - jakeva 6y ago
        I assume comments like that are from people who are conflicted by the fact that if their head weren't so far up their ass they would have entertained the notion enough to at least acquire a few bitcoin, but because it's now too late it's better to celebrate just how far up their ass their head is.
Dzugaru 6y ago
Good read. Is there a similar take on how proof-of-stake can work (for example current sketch of Ethereum Casper protocol)?
- gt565k 6y ago
  Check out Cardano's papers. Its PoS protocol has been live on mainnet for a while. Native token support just rolled out to mainnet yesterday and smart contracts are coming in Q2 this year. It was founded by ETH co-founder Charles, who formed an academia network of CS PhD researchers to deal with 3rd gen blockchain problems and solutions. It is 3rd gen blockchain built to handle the problems of ethereum and other blockchains that came prior. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-research-papers-and-specifications.html https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
- DennisP 6y ago
  Here are the two papers on Casper: Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 Combining GHOST and Casper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 A very simple summary is that it's a fairly traditional consensus protocol, in which if anyone breaks the rules it's possible to prove who did it and penalize them by burning their stake. It achieves scale by using aggregated signatures.
johndoe42377 6y ago
Honestly, what kind of bullshit is this?
amelius 6y ago
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
- bdamm 6y ago
  If Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, then gold must be as well.
  - jhauris 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on how that's true? Gold has use in making other physical products, such as electronics, which can do things and thus create value. Bitcoin comparatively seems to be a net drain on resources and value.
    - TheBlight 6y ago
      The vast majority of gold is held for speculation. If that use case went away it'd be effectively worthless.
      - epx 6y ago
        Wrong. It it fell 50%, many industrial uses of gold would resume. I'd have 4 gold fountain pens instead of 2.
        TheBlight 6y ago
        Lol I stand corrected :)
  - ttul 6y ago
    Not really. Half of the value of gold, or thereabouts, relates to its utility as a metal. Bitcoin is purely valued because people believe others will buy it from them in future at a good price - hopefully a higher price.
    - doomroot 6y ago
knodi 6y ago
Bitcoin has turned in a joke.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  When, if ever, was it serious?
- joshsyn 6y ago
  A 1.5 trillion dollar joke. Thanks to the Fed who pumped trillions of dollars back in 2008
- moralsupply 6y ago
  I'm certainly laughing with how much purchase power Bitcoin provided me so far. I'll be laughing at your comment in 5 years time once a single Bitcoin will be valued above $1M USD while your fiat currency savings will have lost at least 50% of its current purchase power. Screenshot this.
  - blobster 6y ago
    You're predicting >12% yearly inflation? That seems like a pretty bold prediction. I'm curious if you have any sources that would back your prediction.
    - moralsupply 6y ago
      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
      - blobster 6y ago
        Would you be willing to bet on it? I'd love some easy money.
hodder 6y ago
This is the most nonsense article Ive read in a long time. The leap after leap of bias is amazing.
- capableweb 6y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're here to discuss, you might as well do it properly. I'd love to hear what exactly is nonsense (or if it's easier for you, what's not nonsense). Also pointing out the exact flaws regarding "leap of bias" would be helpful.
- afc 6y ago
  I agree. I believe strongly in Bitcoin, but I think this article was just a bunch of pompous poetry without any substance. "The difficulty adjustment makes sure that the ticks of Bitcoin’s internal metronome are somewhat constant. It is the conductor of the Bitcoin orchestra. It is what keeps the music alive." Blah blah blah blah! So much fluff to say so little...
  - capableweb 6y ago
    I feel like your expectations are a bit off. What did you expect from a blogpost titled "Bitcoin Is Time"? A serious whitepaper on how Bitcoin actually is what we consider time? Of course it's gonna be fluffy poetry, it's right there in the title!
    - afc 6y ago
      I expected some moderately insightful analysis, where I would come out with one or two interesting new ideas.
- iamcurious 6y ago
  He presents bitcoin as a way of knowing if some event happened after some other event, that is a clock, where are all the bias leaps?
randomopining 6y ago
Bitcoin is deflationary thus by nature it lets you lock in your time-value.
gillesjacobs 6y ago
Proof-of-history using verifiable delay functions (VDF) is a valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks [1]. Solana is build on top of it and it looks very promising as a fast consensus mechanism. OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effect. 1. https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-blockchain-cf47a61a9274 https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-...
- bearerofgarbage 6y ago
  what problem of value does it solve? every post including cryptocoin here gets a generic comment like yours about some other cryptocoin that is 'very promising'
  - jtms 6y ago
    It appears that it solves the problem of there needing to be yet another cryptocurrency
  - gillesjacobs 6y ago
    I wanted to share a cool algorithm related to the time as consensus. My intention was not to shill a specific project. I follow alternative consensus algorithms and trustless decentralized app tech in the blockchain space because I think it is interesting and democratizing tech. I do not own half of the coins I follow and couldn't care less for speculation. Technologically, cryptocurrency is still an exiting domain and scepticism is in place, but the blind hate for anything blockchain on HN is a bit OTT.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Maybe try reading the post again? I have no affiliation or even opinion about that coin, but it is painfully clear for that post only that the proposed problem of value is "valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks". Half of the comments on this page complain about how Bitcoin uses too much energy and how PoW is wasteful. This is a direct (allegedly, if what they write is correct) solution to exactly that.
gt565k 6y ago
Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech. Yes it's old, yes it's slow, yes it wastes resources. It is legacy software after all. PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. Cardano's Ouroboros is a provable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-research-papers-and-specifications.html https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
- ksm1717 6y ago
  I wonder the same thing about people that still talk about cars. Electric cars solve all the problems with cars. Why do we even bother to talk about cars?
- user-the-name 6y ago
  > PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. For a value of "solves" that doesn't actually include anyone solving anything YET. Maybe in 18 months!
- olah_1 6y ago
  I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king. Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_. Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.
  - vekker 6y ago
    Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources? This is why people argue PoS blockchains are (besides being more eco-friendly) actually more decentralized.
    - olah_1 6y ago
SkipperCat 6y ago
Bitcoin is only popular because tech workers get paid a lot and have the ability to speculate, we live in a world of massive asset bubbles created by government fiscal policies and Bitcoin is excellent for buying drugs on-line. Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one. All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do kind of enjoy them.
- arbawk 6y ago
  Actually it's pretty important for many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoption/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bena 6y ago
    I see this being thrown about as a talking point a lot, but I think it ignores what's fundamentally happening here. Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies. They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons. Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to convert their native currencies into USD, a stronger currency. So while it's a good use-case for Bitcoin, it's not exactly a situation that's applicable to the world at large.
    - andreygrehov 6y ago
      > Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.
olah_1 6y ago
This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    > using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
    - yerwhat01010 6y ago
      > What do we get in return? Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
      - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
        There are millions of people who use it, trade it, store their value in it, program more software for it etc. They see the answer, they get the point. Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?
        notahacker 6y ago
        I think the more pertinent question is, if they all halted what they are doing for an indeterminate amount of time for other people to get it, would the world [in future] be a worse place? And how?
kozak 6y ago
If you liked this article, you will probably also enjoy "Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time" by Sean Carroll (I listened to it as an audiobook, I don't know what other formats it is available in).
A12-B 6y ago
The article implies bitcoin could be something other than money, in that it is just a really useful ledger.
dandanua 6y ago
Bitcoin network is constantly readjusting mining complexity, so that every new block will be mined in approximately 10 minutes. Then, they substitute the notion of time with the sequence of Bitcoin blocks. Yeah, well done! Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane.
- Vecr 6y ago
  It's always been like this, I'm not sure what you mean by "becoming". According to this article, the concept comes from a series of papers from the 1990s.
- olalonde 6y ago
  > Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane. Don't give them too much credit. The notion of time in distributed systems has been defined "insanely" since at least 1978[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp
- dandanua 6y ago
  EDIT: To be honest, knowledge of the hash of a block can be used as a proof that something has happened AFTER a particular event (similarly to a picture of a hostage with the newspaper). But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes. Also, this "feature" is unrelated to Bitcoin being a cryptocurrency. You can have cryptocurrencies without "global time" (e.g. NANO).
  - mtve 6y ago
    > But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes. https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dandanua 6y ago
option_greek 6y ago
HN comments on articles like this remind me of a fun t-shirt quote: There are 10 kinds of people in the world. The ones who understand binary and the ones that do not. You can obviously replace binary with bitcoin :). The ones who do not get bitcoin, will continue to not get bitcoin.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Yes you can replace "binary" with "bitcoin", if you absolutely don't understand the joke, at all.
  - greggturkington 6y ago
    And hopefully we can keep the discussion a bit more insightful than "a fun t-shirt quote" prior to Eternal September
justicezyx 6y ago
Not the first time I whine about the elusiveness of human writing: I could not find what's the article talking about after scrolling one screen...
agumonkey 6y ago
Talking about that I see a few projects throwing the idea generalized of time limited currency. I find the idea a bit interesting and weird at the same time.
gnrlst 6y ago
I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina. - transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators. This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-store-of-value-and-reserve-currency-3b0318844bc8 https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor... I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.
- mmastrac 6y ago
  > The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    It's not, it's fully functional and there are many users. Only people who haven't actually tried using it says things like "it's incredibly buggy".
    - ketamine__ 6y ago
      How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?
abledon 6y ago
I'm curious how 70% of mining of BTC is done by China... how USA will react to allow BTC to take over their financial territory? Can governments step in and do some sort of play on this to not lose out on their value?
- moralsupply 6y ago
  Check again. 70% of the mining pools are in China The majority of the hash rate is produced in the USA
f430 6y ago
You mean bitcoin is a ticking time bomb kept afloat by an unbacked asset that is now the target of Federal agencies?
- shoshino 6y ago
  Tether's impact on the price of Bitcoin is grossly misreported and without basis. The only "Federal agency" targeting Tether was the New York Attorney General's office, however the investigation was settled last month with with no admission of guilt from Tether.
  - f430 6y ago
    did you even read the settlement?
deleted 6y ago
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anthropodie 6y ago
That was an excellent read! Every time I read about Bitcoin here, I see the "Energy" arguments. Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific problem and it solves that. Even Satoshi himself would not have foreseen the energy requirements for PoW. If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. Technological advancements will always need energy. We should be discussing about how to efficiently harness that big fiery ball in space instead of shutting down technological advancements.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  What problem did bitcoin solve?
  - anthropodie 6y ago
    Did you read the article?
    - raziel2701 6y ago
      Bitcoin solved the double-spending problem. A problem long ago solved by centralized banking at significantly lower energy costs. You speak of continuing to allow wasteful energy expenditures in analogy to going to the moon and building the LHC, but if we already know how to solve double-spending problem at lower energy costs, why should we allow bitcoin? So I ask in good faith, what problem did bitcoin solve that nothing else has?
      - georgesC 6y ago
        Bitcoin solved the double spending problem in a decentralized system. This has numerous consequences, among them the possibility of creating a currency that doesn't rely on a centralized authority, trust minimization, immutability, etc. To me this has the potential to automate many jobs.
        hannasanarion 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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boredpandas777 6y ago
Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this. The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind. It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.
  - epx 6y ago
    This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Yes this is true. What people want is a less risky investment/inflation hedge and the Fed is forcing people to accept more risk. That's not a good thing because there are better ways to utilize the stimulus money.
- anthropodie 6y ago
  > Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?
ajarmst 6y ago
I always enjoy conversations with cryptocurrency cognoscenti: "Ok. Assume I have some bitcoin (a bitcoin? bitcoins?). How would I exchange it for, say, a carton of milk?" Don't get me wrong. I'm a math nerd. I think bitcoin is fascinating as a technical achievement, and hope we keep exploring the blockchain idea. However, I also know that bitcoin mania has literally affected global supply chains of computer components and inflicted a measurable exacerbation of global warming. There is a colourable argument about whether bitcoins have value, but it's very clear that bitcoin has a non-trivial cost.
- o_p 6y ago
  Personally I see bitcoin more as internet gold, you wouldnt buy a carton of milk with gold either, but you can create commerce services on top of bitcoin who are backed by this descentralized currency
- tim333 6y ago
  Presently sell bitcoin for cash, swap cash for milk. Same as for stocks, bonds, gold bars, foreign currency and many other time honoured investments.
  - ajarmst 6y ago
    Yes, but that would also apply if what I had was a used car, rather than bitcoin or gold, etc. The requirement for intermediate conversion to another currency in order to realize value implies that bitcoin isn’t (at least yet) a currency (even in the case where foreign currency isn’t local currency, there is a context where it is currency: that foreign country). I can also buy milk by exchanging my car for local currency, and it has at least some intrinsic value. I realize that the currency/money question is far more complex (my car is neither fungible nor easily portable), but I wonder how many of those speculating on bitcoin’s value appreciate that or are capable of explaining why Bitcoin has any advantages over gold or bearer bonds as a repository of value. Or, for that matter, how speculating in Bitcoin in the 20th century is different from speculating in Tulips in the 17th. Right now, Bitcoin’s primary economic role seems to be as a demonstration of just how many Greater Fools the internet and social media give us access to.
ypeterholmes 6y ago
Time is money.. proceeds to write a 3hr read
delaaxe 6y ago
I'd really like to read a similar write-up about proof of stake
drazulay 6y ago
Did you mean: bitcoin is _timestamped_? ;) If I might chip in with my freshly minted 1 karma account.. Bitcoin/"Satoshi" was an incubator of sorts. It brought the brightest minds together to build a new internet that is resistant to tampering by your neighbour or the government. It will in due time make way for the rising stars in that sector (IOHK I'm looking at you!) that will incrementally work toward perfect balance, until it itself is superseded some day.
_Nat_ 6y ago
tl;dr- The article's a bit confused, so to clarify: Bitcoin's entropy starts maximized, and then miners reduce it. According to the second-law-of-thermodynamics, the net-entropy of the universe tends to increase, so Bitcoin's entropy-reduction is just increasing entropy elsewhere (hence its huge electric consumption). Bitcoin's doing this because its security is based on having a high-entropy barrier against attackers (like a good password), except instead of a legitimate party being whoever has the password (and thus can beat attackers), it's based on whoever can attack the entropy the best (through 51%+ control of mining). --- Some of the entropy stuff seems a bit confused. As time goes on, Bitcoin's blockchain's entropy is decreasing, not increasing. The [genesis-block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block) is like a [nucleation-seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal), and the blockchain's growing from that genesis-block like ice crystallizing from a nucleation-seed as the surrounding water freezes. The second-law-of-thermodynamics asserts that entropy tends to increase in the overall system, in a cumulative sense, but not necessarily throughout the entire system. Bitcoin's blockchain's removed entropy tends to imply an increase of entropy in the surrounding environment (leading to the environmental concerns with its energy-consumption). If Bitcoin's mining-difficulty were reduced and the miner-pool shrunk a lot, then Bitcoin's blockchain would have less entropy removed, but the environment would have less entropy added to it as Bitcoin's power-consumption would be less. This is by-design. For example, if you want a secure password, then you want it to have [high entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a_measure_of_password_strength https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a...), because then it's harder for an attacker to guess your password. Bitcoin's the same way, except that it doesn't start knowing the password -- instead, Bitcoin asserts that whoever controls the most entropy-removing-power (mining power) is the correct authority. So that's why [Bitcoin sets a high-enough difficulty](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty): it needs a high-enough difficulty to prevent someone from easily [faking a longer blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack).
caycep 6y ago
I probably need to read this more closely after work, but have to ask - have there been thermodynamic esp w/r to information theory/shannon entropy, information encoding properties of bitcoin?
geraldbauer 6y ago
Reminder: Bitcon is a ponzi. Learn how the investment fraud works. [1] [1]: https://github.com/openblockchains/bitcoin-ponzi https://github.com/openblockchains/bitcoin-ponzi
- arbawk 6y ago
  The very first line is flawed as mining companies are increasingly not selling their mined bitcoin. Why would they? They are obviously mining because they are bullish. In fact, who is selling bitcoin? Only those that don't believe it won't be an upgrade to base-layer money. Those that would call themselves bitcoiners don't want to sell it. I've never heard of a Ponzi where some people just won't sell! This page is an embarrassing collection of misinformation.
xtracto 6y ago
I'm ready to be downvoted but... nah just following the stupid memes. The article made thing an interesting point regarding how information cannot be "moved" itself but only copied and then the previous copy destroyed. I think RIAA, MPAA and other virtual goods creators could benefit from the non-fungible tokens things that are just raising as a use of the blockchain.
o_p 6y ago
So the propaganda machine is now trying to smear Bitcoin because of energy, ridiculous! I guess that the smearing it by associating it with criminlals didnt worked well enough. T
teatree 6y ago
A few questions I need help with - If bitcoin becomes a store of value / digital gold and people increasingly hold their wealth in Bitcoin countries will lose the ability control and regulate their own economy. 1) Why would any country hand over the reins of its economy to others ? India is already thinking of banning cryptocurrencies, China has similar thoughts too, if many large countries ban it how would Bitcoin sustain ? 2) US has fought wars to retain dollar as the global reserve currency. Why would the US give up this advantage ? 3) Presently, economic sanctions are used to push interests and disincentivize bad behavior. How would this play out in a world of Bitcoin ? 4) If bitcoin exists with fiat and exchange points can be controlled and blocked by governments, what's the point of Bitcoin ?
- krupan 6y ago
  1. They won’t hand it over. Bitcoin and it’s participants are taking it. 2. This is the same question as 1, isn’t it? Again, Bitcoin is people voting with their feet (so to speak) to take power away from governments. 3. Economic sanctions punish the common folk more than the evil governments. Bitcoin simultaneously takes power away from evil governments (see 1 and 2) and gives power to common folk. 4. I think you are alluding to one way governments can try to fight what is happening in 1, 2, and 3. If governments really try and crack down on exchanges, people will simply transact directly in Bitcoin. Those who have accumulated it pre-crackdown will purchase goods and services using Bitcoin, people who did not obtain any pre-crackdown and want it will offer goods and services to those who are offering Bitcoin. In all honesty, these extreme scenarios are far fetched. Governments all ultimately get their authority from the people. If the people are choosing Bitcoin, the governments won’t fight it for long.
- arbawk 6y ago
  1) Countries economies consist of the individuals within them. In India, where Bitcoin is banned, its exchange rate has since increased. Same in Pakistan. Hyperinflation occurs frequently despite a governments' best efforts. The market is the master and the government is only an actor. 2) This is probably the best piece on that point: https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoin/ https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoi.... The summary is that unlike another country's currency, Bitcoin is significantly harder to attack. 3) Economic sanctions can still exist. You still have to pay your taxes even though many avoid them. What sanctions are you referring to specifically? 4) Look into the Lightning Network to see one among various ways Bitcoin is scaling outside of exchanges. It will continue to develop in interesting ways. In the meantime, governments that enable what a growing number of people want will be rewarded while those that attempt to ban it will suffer. The incentives to do so are not in their favor (also argued in the article above).
deleted 6y ago
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u678u 6y ago
One thing that always bothers me about BTC is that the whole blockchain is kept, its like half a terabyte by now. Will they ever agree to just trim off everything older than XXX days or similar? It seems hugely inefficient.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  If its trimmed and only last xxx blocks are kept (there are no days in bitcoin as the article nicely puts it) then the people who have bitcoins and just hold it before the trimming happened will lose bitcoins or won't be able to spend them. Every time somebody does a transaction involving bitcoins mined from a long time ago the entire ledger is need it to see the origins of those bitcoins.
  - u678u 6y ago
    OK I see, thanks for the reply. Seems like it'll remain huge for a long time yet.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Depends on what "huge" means to you. Bitcoin is 12 years old now, and it's 320 GB. I could store 2 full copies of it on what's left of my 2TB laptop SSD. In another 12 years, that is in 2033, it will be 640 GB. I'm pretty sure I'll have more than 2TB in my laptop by then; and I could fit one copy of that future blockchain on my SSD right now. Or to put it slightly differently, I can fit the whole BTC chain on a $20 USB stick.
md2020 6y ago
The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nuclear fusion takes a ton of energy, and gold is one of the heavier naturally occurring elements. As the article mentions, all physical assets can retain value because they're impossible to copy. If I give you my gold, the transfer of value is being held up by the laws of physics. You now have it, and I don't. There's no ledger keeping track of all the gold atoms in the universe, therefore it's trivial to transfer it from one part of space to another. What keeps us from having some cryptographic primitive that enforces the same thing? Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.
- crazypython 6y ago
  > What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? You can infinitely copy information. It's in the article.
  - md2020 6y ago
    Yeah, I read the article. My question was what really prevents the existence of some cryptographic operation that would allow us to "port" the laws of physics to the digital space, so that when information moves we could enforce that the sender no longer has it and the receiver does.
    - nadahalli 6y ago
      That primitive has not been invented (maybe yet). Till then, we have Bitcoin.
- samatman 6y ago
  I think you would enjoy reading Claude Shannon's seminal paper on information theory. What you are proposing is profoundly silly. But to understand why it's profoundly silly is very much worthwhile! http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
sova 6y ago
>Time is the only thing we will never be able to make more of. It is The Ultimate Resource, as Julian Simon points out. This makes Bitcoin the ultimate form of money because its issuance is directly linked to the ultimate resource of our universe: time. All things equal, BTC has a limited supply, making it unusable as a currency (but great as a deflationary store of value). I suppose the definition of "money" is less specific than "currency," but this notion of "money" goes contrary to the nomenclature of the human realm. Yes, technically anything that is tradable is "money," but then the term becomes rather meaningless. Money must be backed by a creative asset, such as an orchard or labor or technology. Time alone a currency does not make.
- arbawk 6y ago
  You should read the Bitcoin Standard or Layered Money to get a sense of what money is and how your notions are quite far from the truth, although delivered with feverish confidence. BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue? Bitcoin is backed by proof of work. Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. I really suggest thinking about this for a lot longer.
  - sova 6y ago
    I do not disagree that BTC is a great store of value, I disagree that it is a "currency." Which is usually what the term "money" denotes. BTC in particular has long transaction verification times that are growing longer. >Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue? To be useful as a day-to-day currency there needs to be a balance between inflation and value. Currency works best when people are not encouraged to hoard it, because then the economic incentive of using money is there. If I hold on to a dollar, in <30 years it will have about half that spending power at current inflationary momentum. Thus, it is more prudent to spend the currency on assets or exchange them for necessities. If the currency itself increases in value as time goes on, the incentive to exchange it for goods and services is actually not there. Currency comes from the word current meaning flow. Hoarding something is the opposite of letting things flow. >BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. BTC is not "infinitely divisible." There is a smallest unit of BTC known as a satoshi, and transaction fees (the amount you must include to incentivize miners to actually put your transaction into a block) is already greater than the amount of BTC stored in some addresses. >Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. It may be the case that there are unsavory entities between the creative asset and the actual printed bill, but currency is at its basis rooted in the creative yield of branch or brain.
jeofken 6y ago
Are there any users of Offset [0] here on HN? [0] https://www.freedomlayer.org/offset/ https://www.freedomlayer.org/offset/
bswen 6y ago
Have fun staying poor haters
Klwohu 6y ago
I love how Bitcoin has transcended technology to become some magical blend of social cause slash liberation theology religion.
ffggvv 6y ago
Bitcoin is a pump and dump. Pump and dumps have legitimate value as long as people pay for them. This will remain true even if it goes to 200k, or 2m. In fact the higher it goes, the more of a pump and dump scheme it is. how many people would buy it (or even care about it) if they were gauranteed 100% that it would never increase in price? None. this proves its purely a speculative asset with the hope to dump the bags on some other greater fool. if there was some legitimate use then the focus would all be on stablecoins or people would love bitcoin even if it went down in value.
AzzieElbab 6y ago
Interesting article, echoing both “The scandal of money” and “Life after google” by George Gilder
SPBS 6y ago
This article was a good dive into the technical feats of bitcoin. But this fact still stands: == Traditional currency == - needs central authority + energy efficient == Bitcoin == + doesn't need central authority - energy intensive If there already is a central authority you can trust, it doesn't make sense to go through the song and dance of having a trustless currency system designed to work under adversarial conditions. Bitcoin isn't on the cusp of taking over the world, it fulfills a specific niche.
Uptrenda 6y ago
I'm so sick of these profound-sounding blog posts that take 1 million words to say precisely jack shit. Yes, the key innovation around Bitcoin was to order events. You can call this 'time' if you want. This is literally the most obvious thing you can say about the system. It's so obvious in fact that it's in the introduction section to the Bitcoin whitepaper. Here is the entire blog post written much shorter and more precisely by Satoshi: 'In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.' Not trying to be elitist but if you find this topic new then you probably also find Bitcoin's technical workings new. Since it's now more than a decade old I don't find this a very topical inclusion for a 'news' site.
- qyi 6y ago
  It was easier for me. With JS disabled it's just a blank page.
- lionhearted 6y ago
  I'm voting you up, but a respectful disagreement... I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible. Even if there's no grand takeaway. I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable. Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.
- codeproject 6y ago
  thank you, I am sure you save a lot of time for a lot of people. There is an interesting conversation in the movie "wall street". Bud Fox tries to make a sale pitch to Gordon Gekko. After awhile, Gordon says: Now tell me something I don't know.
- pedroma 6y ago
  To be fair to most people, they don't know what any of these terms mean: double-spending, peer-to-peer, distributed server, timestamp, computational proof.
dgreensp 6y ago
It's way more interesting to look at the nuance and downsides of how Bitcoin works than to merely marvel, awe-struck at the concept of a distributed ledger. It's been a few years since I was reading in-depth about Bitcoin, and I don't have references, but off the top of my head: * It's bad for the environment, "wasting" so much electricity on more and more literal busywork... or is it? Apparently it depends where your electricity is coming from (it had better be cheap if you want to make money mining!) and whether you are actually causing additional electricity to be generated or just consuming surplus, or so I've heard. * Control and power over Bitcoin is not all that distributed in practice. Mining a block would take prohibitively long for an individual, so there are mining pools where participants share in the spoils. Mining pools and exchanges have a lot of power. Just as the infrastructure of the Internet is run by big telecommunications companies whose routers talk to each other, there are various major players that make Bitcoin run, and there are occasionally decisions affecting the future and fate of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin politics, like disputes over protocols. * In theory, Bitcoin is hard to fraudulently "take over" because you'd have to have more computing power than the rest of the miners combined, but if you control mining pools, or are China or something, I believe you could do it (and no one would necessarily know?). * The rise of Bitcoin as a currency (not just a ledger/clock) whose value seems to just go up and up raises a lot of questions (IMO) about whether this is a good property of a distributed ledger system.
porknubbins 6y ago
If I ever come to HN and the top comment about Bitcoin is NOT a grumpy “I could build that in a weekend with Aws” style comment I will know the top is finally in. I think the issue is Bitcoin is no longer tech news- its a finance, or social or business topic and for some reason it inspires engineers to try to reanalyze everything from first principles to write angry comments that miss the forest for the trees. I can only imagine how something like NFTs which truly appear to be a baseless speculative mania would go over.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xk_ 6y ago
  > I can only imagine NFTs would go over The recent thread about Nyan Cat's NFT sale is an indicator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 From the comments: "The comments in this thread resemble comments dismissing BTC in 2011/2012" Welp, you were right!
debbiedowner 6y ago
Wouldn't it be great if there was a proof of work mechanism that took time, but very little energy? I think there will be a low power processor that can perform unique instructions that are expensive to simulate on CPUs and GPUs, but is amenable to hashing, and is not too expensive to buy. My guess is something neuromorphic. The first mWpowcoin could then be born. I do see a downside that people will have to buy a special chip that has little general utility, but from the rise of ASICs that must be ok. I know proof of stake exists, but clearly it isn't as popular. People like mining?
amitprayal 6y ago
Bitcoin is Tulipmania
nadahalli 6y ago
For those who already know about Bitcoin's timestamping really well, it's worth reading about the time-warp attack. David Harding wrote a great answer about it on StackExchange ages ago: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-time-warp-attack-and-how-does-it-work-in-general https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-ti...
ace_of_spades 6y ago
While I find decentralized digital ledgers interesting and potentially useful, I am always surprised how people think that they need to jump on bitcoin as it somehow must be the best choice for the future of money. At least to me it seems unlikely that the first feasible solution to a difficult problem is already the best. Several problems with bitcoin provide evidence for this idea. Thus, it seems like the mechanism which keeps bitcoin running is something similar to the sunk cost fallacy or framed differently attachment to a state of the ledger that is perceived as favorable by the invested community. I hope that people will realize soon enough that bitcoin should probably more be treated like a nice art project - not more, not less.

444 points by taylorwc 6y ago

Here's another good one (30 min read): Bitcoin is Venice https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda42070 https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda...

gillesjacobs 6y ago
Funny, I pinned Bitcoin more as the type to honeymoon at the Maldives. Bitcoin is a Venice, time, a Ponzi scheme, a climate disaster, digital gold, dead (x400), criminal, a bubble... The half-baked hot takes that reach the frontpage of HN are getting better and better.

tromp 6y ago

With an emission of 1 per second forever, Grin is more like time (I make the case for uncapped supply in [1]). [1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153 https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...

smt88 6y ago

Isn't Bitcoin a combination of processing hardware and electricity? Time, in the human sense, seems somewhat irrelevant because humans can't/don't hash manually. Disclaimer: This site doesn't work in Firefox on Android for some reason, so I'm asking in total ignorance of the article's content.

keiferski 6y ago

Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges-and-money/ https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges-and-money/

zitterbewegung 6y ago
Nearly any currency when used in commerce is primarily used as an IOU for time. Due how the POW is designed to ensure immutability of the blockchain it also is dependent on how cheap it is to generate energy for the people who mine. Comparing it to a bank with fiat a bank usually ensures the consistency of transactions so miners perform this action (and also developers of bitcoin if there are security holes) and your wallet is an account and bitcoin have a transaction cost which is like using a debit card associated with an account.
7373737373 6y ago
> Richard Dawkins said in an offhand comment in The Selfish Gene that “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.” - https://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-theory-of-money/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-the...
- dnautics 6y ago
  This isn't too far off from the point that David graeber makes in debt: the first 5000 years
  - kiliantics 6y ago
    I think this is a rosy-eyed view. Money is a formalised manifestation of debt, which previously was an informal system of reciprocity and altruism. But formalising this debt with financial and monetary systems destroyed the altruistic part of the arrangement. Graeber explains how money was created by states to enforce its authority and basically coerce people into participation. The anonymity of monetary debt and the fact that the system is controlled by the "powers that be" make it kind of the opposite of altruism.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      I thought that "darkness" was slyly implied in the dawkins quote

imwillofficial 6y ago

Bitcoin is time, bitcoin is love, bitcoin is life.

moralsupply 6y ago
Underrated comment

joshsyn 6y ago

Buying bitcoin early would have put me 10 years ahead. Missed, maybe bitcoin cash isn't bad as everyone taints it to be.

joshsyn 6y ago
Only a salty bitch would downvote this comment.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

joosters 6y ago

Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.

kneel 6y ago
Negative yielding debt is literally a waste of time. Money is worth less as you move into the future. Fiat is literally a black hole.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  What percentage of assets are negative yielding? They can’t all be negative in real terms.
  - kolinko 6y ago
    All cash is, also any investment below inflation - so most bonds.
    - diab0lic 6y ago
      This motivates productive use of that capital. Deflationary currencies just guarantee the rich get richer as an axiom.
      - vntok 6y ago
        > This motivates productive use of that capital. Nah. It motivates rational beings to spend that capital on anything at all, as fast as possible, because the alternative is a net loss of purchasing power. Deflationary currencies on the contrary motivate actors to think before spending, because any spending has to be balanced with the future gains that won't come from holding it and seing it accumulate value over time.
      - kneel 6y ago
        The real solution exists somewhere in between an inflationary and deflationary currency. This is a balancing act.

phyro 6y ago

Thank you for sharing this! I wrote a much shorter article on why I believe Grin is the closest to "time is money" here https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html https://phyro.github.io/what-is-grin/grin_emission.html Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.

hanniabu 6y ago
How is Bitcoin's admission exponential? Isn't it a stepped linear emission?
- tromp 6y ago
  It's inverse exponentially approaching the 21 million limit, which it can never reach [1]. [1] https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million-7263e322de1 https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-nev...
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    It's a stepped linear emission that mimics an inverse exponential emission. You can even see it in that chart if you expand it. Between the halving periods the emission is constant.
    - tromp 6y ago
      The block subsidy is constant between halvings. And is thus a step function. But "emission" refers to cumulative block subsidies. And thus is piecewise linear, with 34 pieces of exponentially decreasing slope, the last one ending up flat.
    - phyro 6y ago
      If you zoom in enough, you won't see these exponential steps. If you were able to zoom out completely, you'd see _only_ the exponential function. Bitcoin's emission is an exponential function (dropping exponentially), the fact that there is some time period between these exponential steps does not make it non-exponential. This would have been obvious if the halvings were every 30 minutes, but it's much less obvious when the "in-between step interval" is 4 years.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago

Bitcoin is entropy. Sheer wasted electricity.

arbawk 6y ago
You didn't read the article, did you?
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  I have ahem lost more than enough time on articles about Bitcoin, and its tiresome wide-eyed fanatics. The comments are bad enough.
  - doomroot 6y ago
    Hfsp
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    And yet you found time to litter internet with you telling other people that you won't spend even little time understanding the topic at hand or posting something produced by your own thinking... That's even worse than creatively criticising the topic, that's just meaningless jibberjabber. PS let me rephrase my point: you write "I have ahem lost more than enough time on articles about Bitcoin, and its tiresome wide-eyed fanatics. The comments are bad enough." implying that you have decided for yourself that you are not wanting to spend any more time on adding meaningful things to this conversation. Who do you think is interested in this information? Why on earth would you think it's a useful thing to share (on top of that with that negative attitude that makes it painful for a normal person to read)? If you don't want to participate, just don't.
    - jakeva 6y ago
      I assume comments like that are from people who are conflicted by the fact that if their head weren't so far up their ass they would have entertained the notion enough to at least acquire a few bitcoin, but because it's now too late it's better to celebrate just how far up their ass their head is.

Dzugaru 6y ago

Good read. Is there a similar take on how proof-of-stake can work (for example current sketch of Ethereum Casper protocol)?

gt565k 6y ago
Check out Cardano's papers. Its PoS protocol has been live on mainnet for a while. Native token support just rolled out to mainnet yesterday and smart contracts are coming in Q2 this year. It was founded by ETH co-founder Charles, who formed an academia network of CS PhD researchers to deal with 3rd gen blockchain problems and solutions. It is 3rd gen blockchain built to handle the problems of ethereum and other blockchains that came prior. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-research-papers-and-specifications.html https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
DennisP 6y ago
Here are the two papers on Casper: Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 Combining GHOST and Casper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 A very simple summary is that it's a fairly traditional consensus protocol, in which if anyone breaks the rules it's possible to prove who did it and penalize them by burning their stake. It achieves scale by using aggregated signatures.

johndoe42377 6y ago

Honestly, what kind of bullshit is this?

amelius 6y ago

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.

bdamm 6y ago
If Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, then gold must be as well.
- jhauris 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on how that's true? Gold has use in making other physical products, such as electronics, which can do things and thus create value. Bitcoin comparatively seems to be a net drain on resources and value.
  - TheBlight 6y ago
    The vast majority of gold is held for speculation. If that use case went away it'd be effectively worthless.
    - epx 6y ago
      Wrong. It it fell 50%, many industrial uses of gold would resume. I'd have 4 gold fountain pens instead of 2.
      - TheBlight 6y ago
        Lol I stand corrected :)
- ttul 6y ago
  Not really. Half of the value of gold, or thereabouts, relates to its utility as a metal. Bitcoin is purely valued because people believe others will buy it from them in future at a good price - hopefully a higher price.
  - doomroot 6y ago

knodi 6y ago

Bitcoin has turned in a joke.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
When, if ever, was it serious?
joshsyn 6y ago
A 1.5 trillion dollar joke. Thanks to the Fed who pumped trillions of dollars back in 2008
moralsupply 6y ago
I'm certainly laughing with how much purchase power Bitcoin provided me so far. I'll be laughing at your comment in 5 years time once a single Bitcoin will be valued above $1M USD while your fiat currency savings will have lost at least 50% of its current purchase power. Screenshot this.
- blobster 6y ago
  You're predicting >12% yearly inflation? That seems like a pretty bold prediction. I'm curious if you have any sources that would back your prediction.
  - moralsupply 6y ago
    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
    - blobster 6y ago
      Would you be willing to bet on it? I'd love some easy money.

hodder 6y ago

This is the most nonsense article Ive read in a long time. The leap after leap of bias is amazing.

capableweb 6y ago
I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're here to discuss, you might as well do it properly. I'd love to hear what exactly is nonsense (or if it's easier for you, what's not nonsense). Also pointing out the exact flaws regarding "leap of bias" would be helpful.
afc 6y ago
I agree. I believe strongly in Bitcoin, but I think this article was just a bunch of pompous poetry without any substance. "The difficulty adjustment makes sure that the ticks of Bitcoin’s internal metronome are somewhat constant. It is the conductor of the Bitcoin orchestra. It is what keeps the music alive." Blah blah blah blah! So much fluff to say so little...
- capableweb 6y ago
  I feel like your expectations are a bit off. What did you expect from a blogpost titled "Bitcoin Is Time"? A serious whitepaper on how Bitcoin actually is what we consider time? Of course it's gonna be fluffy poetry, it's right there in the title!
  - afc 6y ago
    I expected some moderately insightful analysis, where I would come out with one or two interesting new ideas.
iamcurious 6y ago
He presents bitcoin as a way of knowing if some event happened after some other event, that is a clock, where are all the bias leaps?

randomopining 6y ago

Bitcoin is deflationary thus by nature it lets you lock in your time-value.

gillesjacobs 6y ago

Proof-of-history using verifiable delay functions (VDF) is a valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks [1]. Solana is build on top of it and it looks very promising as a fast consensus mechanism. OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effect. 1. https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-blockchain-cf47a61a9274 https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-...

bearerofgarbage 6y ago
what problem of value does it solve? every post including cryptocoin here gets a generic comment like yours about some other cryptocoin that is 'very promising'
- jtms 6y ago
  It appears that it solves the problem of there needing to be yet another cryptocurrency
- gillesjacobs 6y ago
  I wanted to share a cool algorithm related to the time as consensus. My intention was not to shill a specific project. I follow alternative consensus algorithms and trustless decentralized app tech in the blockchain space because I think it is interesting and democratizing tech. I do not own half of the coins I follow and couldn't care less for speculation. Technologically, cryptocurrency is still an exiting domain and scepticism is in place, but the blind hate for anything blockchain on HN is a bit OTT.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  Maybe try reading the post again? I have no affiliation or even opinion about that coin, but it is painfully clear for that post only that the proposed problem of value is "valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks". Half of the comments on this page complain about how Bitcoin uses too much energy and how PoW is wasteful. This is a direct (allegedly, if what they write is correct) solution to exactly that.

gt565k 6y ago

Why are we still talking about bitcoin and first gen blockchain tech. Yes it's old, yes it's slow, yes it wastes resources. It is legacy software after all. PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. Cardano's Ouroboros is a provable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol. https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-research-papers-and-specifications.html https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...

ksm1717 6y ago
I wonder the same thing about people that still talk about cars. Electric cars solve all the problems with cars. Why do we even bother to talk about cars?
user-the-name 6y ago
> PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy. For a value of "solves" that doesn't actually include anyone solving anything YET. Maybe in 18 months!
olah_1 6y ago
I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king. Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_. Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.
- vekker 6y ago
  Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources? This is why people argue PoS blockchains are (besides being more eco-friendly) actually more decentralized.
  - olah_1 6y ago

SkipperCat 6y ago

Bitcoin is only popular because tech workers get paid a lot and have the ability to speculate, we live in a world of massive asset bubbles created by government fiscal policies and Bitcoin is excellent for buying drugs on-line. Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one. All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do kind of enjoy them.

arbawk 6y ago
Actually it's pretty important for many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoption/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
- deleted 6y ago
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- bena 6y ago
  I see this being thrown about as a talking point a lot, but I think it ignores what's fundamentally happening here. Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies. They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons. Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to convert their native currencies into USD, a stronger currency. So while it's a good use-case for Bitcoin, it's not exactly a situation that's applicable to the world at large.
  - andreygrehov 6y ago
    > Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.

olah_1 6y ago

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

user-the-name 6y ago
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
  - yerwhat01010 6y ago
    > What do we get in return? Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      There are millions of people who use it, trade it, store their value in it, program more software for it etc. They see the answer, they get the point. Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?
      - notahacker 6y ago
        I think the more pertinent question is, if they all halted what they are doing for an indeterminate amount of time for other people to get it, would the world [in future] be a worse place? And how?

kozak 6y ago

If you liked this article, you will probably also enjoy "Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time" by Sean Carroll (I listened to it as an audiobook, I don't know what other formats it is available in).

A12-B 6y ago

The article implies bitcoin could be something other than money, in that it is just a really useful ledger.

dandanua 6y ago

Bitcoin network is constantly readjusting mining complexity, so that every new block will be mined in approximately 10 minutes. Then, they substitute the notion of time with the sequence of Bitcoin blocks. Yeah, well done! Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane.

Vecr 6y ago
It's always been like this, I'm not sure what you mean by "becoming". According to this article, the concept comes from a series of papers from the 1990s.
olalonde 6y ago
> Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane. Don't give them too much credit. The notion of time in distributed systems has been defined "insanely" since at least 1978[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp
dandanua 6y ago
EDIT: To be honest, knowledge of the hash of a block can be used as a proof that something has happened AFTER a particular event (similarly to a picture of a hostage with the newspaper). But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes. Also, this "feature" is unrelated to Bitcoin being a cryptocurrency. You can have cryptocurrencies without "global time" (e.g. NANO).
- mtve 6y ago
  > But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes. https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dandanua 6y ago

option_greek 6y ago

HN comments on articles like this remind me of a fun t-shirt quote: There are 10 kinds of people in the world. The ones who understand binary and the ones that do not. You can obviously replace binary with bitcoin :). The ones who do not get bitcoin, will continue to not get bitcoin.

mdoms 6y ago
Yes you can replace "binary" with "bitcoin", if you absolutely don't understand the joke, at all.
- greggturkington 6y ago
  And hopefully we can keep the discussion a bit more insightful than "a fun t-shirt quote" prior to Eternal September

justicezyx 6y ago

Not the first time I whine about the elusiveness of human writing: I could not find what's the article talking about after scrolling one screen...

agumonkey 6y ago

Talking about that I see a few projects throwing the idea generalized of time limited currency. I find the idea a bit interesting and weird at the same time.

gnrlst 6y ago

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina. - transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators. This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-store-of-value-and-reserve-currency-3b0318844bc8 https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor... I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.

mmastrac 6y ago
> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  It's not, it's fully functional and there are many users. Only people who haven't actually tried using it says things like "it's incredibly buggy".
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?

abledon 6y ago

I'm curious how 70% of mining of BTC is done by China... how USA will react to allow BTC to take over their financial territory? Can governments step in and do some sort of play on this to not lose out on their value?

moralsupply 6y ago
Check again. 70% of the mining pools are in China The majority of the hash rate is produced in the USA

f430 6y ago

You mean bitcoin is a ticking time bomb kept afloat by an unbacked asset that is now the target of Federal agencies?

shoshino 6y ago
Tether's impact on the price of Bitcoin is grossly misreported and without basis. The only "Federal agency" targeting Tether was the New York Attorney General's office, however the investigation was settled last month with with no admission of guilt from Tether.
- f430 6y ago
  did you even read the settlement?

deleted 6y ago

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anthropodie 6y ago

That was an excellent read! Every time I read about Bitcoin here, I see the "Energy" arguments. Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific problem and it solves that. Even Satoshi himself would not have foreseen the energy requirements for PoW. If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. Technological advancements will always need energy. We should be discussing about how to efficiently harness that big fiery ball in space instead of shutting down technological advancements.

raziel2701 6y ago
What problem did bitcoin solve?
- anthropodie 6y ago
  Did you read the article?
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    Bitcoin solved the double-spending problem. A problem long ago solved by centralized banking at significantly lower energy costs. You speak of continuing to allow wasteful energy expenditures in analogy to going to the moon and building the LHC, but if we already know how to solve double-spending problem at lower energy costs, why should we allow bitcoin? So I ask in good faith, what problem did bitcoin solve that nothing else has?
    - georgesC 6y ago
      Bitcoin solved the double spending problem in a decentralized system. This has numerous consequences, among them the possibility of creating a currency that doesn't rely on a centralized authority, trust minimization, immutability, etc. To me this has the potential to automate many jobs.
      - hannasanarion 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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boredpandas777 6y ago

Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this. The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind. It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.

reader_mode 6y ago
Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.
- epx 6y ago
  This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yes this is true. What people want is a less risky investment/inflation hedge and the Fed is forcing people to accept more risk. That's not a good thing because there are better ways to utilize the stimulus money.
anthropodie 6y ago
> Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?

ajarmst 6y ago

I always enjoy conversations with cryptocurrency cognoscenti: "Ok. Assume I have some bitcoin (a bitcoin? bitcoins?). How would I exchange it for, say, a carton of milk?" Don't get me wrong. I'm a math nerd. I think bitcoin is fascinating as a technical achievement, and hope we keep exploring the blockchain idea. However, I also know that bitcoin mania has literally affected global supply chains of computer components and inflicted a measurable exacerbation of global warming. There is a colourable argument about whether bitcoins have value, but it's very clear that bitcoin has a non-trivial cost.

o_p 6y ago
Personally I see bitcoin more as internet gold, you wouldnt buy a carton of milk with gold either, but you can create commerce services on top of bitcoin who are backed by this descentralized currency
tim333 6y ago
Presently sell bitcoin for cash, swap cash for milk. Same as for stocks, bonds, gold bars, foreign currency and many other time honoured investments.
- ajarmst 6y ago
  Yes, but that would also apply if what I had was a used car, rather than bitcoin or gold, etc. The requirement for intermediate conversion to another currency in order to realize value implies that bitcoin isn’t (at least yet) a currency (even in the case where foreign currency isn’t local currency, there is a context where it is currency: that foreign country). I can also buy milk by exchanging my car for local currency, and it has at least some intrinsic value. I realize that the currency/money question is far more complex (my car is neither fungible nor easily portable), but I wonder how many of those speculating on bitcoin’s value appreciate that or are capable of explaining why Bitcoin has any advantages over gold or bearer bonds as a repository of value. Or, for that matter, how speculating in Bitcoin in the 20th century is different from speculating in Tulips in the 17th. Right now, Bitcoin’s primary economic role seems to be as a demonstration of just how many Greater Fools the internet and social media give us access to.

ypeterholmes 6y ago

Time is money.. proceeds to write a 3hr read

delaaxe 6y ago

I'd really like to read a similar write-up about proof of stake

drazulay 6y ago

Did you mean: bitcoin is _timestamped_? ;) If I might chip in with my freshly minted 1 karma account.. Bitcoin/"Satoshi" was an incubator of sorts. It brought the brightest minds together to build a new internet that is resistant to tampering by your neighbour or the government. It will in due time make way for the rising stars in that sector (IOHK I'm looking at you!) that will incrementally work toward perfect balance, until it itself is superseded some day.

_Nat_ 6y ago

tl;dr- The article's a bit confused, so to clarify: Bitcoin's entropy starts maximized, and then miners reduce it. According to the second-law-of-thermodynamics, the net-entropy of the universe tends to increase, so Bitcoin's entropy-reduction is just increasing entropy elsewhere (hence its huge electric consumption). Bitcoin's doing this because its security is based on having a high-entropy barrier against attackers (like a good password), except instead of a legitimate party being whoever has the password (and thus can beat attackers), it's based on whoever can attack the entropy the best (through 51%+ control of mining). --- Some of the entropy stuff seems a bit confused. As time goes on, Bitcoin's blockchain's entropy is decreasing, not increasing. The [genesis-block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block) is like a [nucleation-seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal), and the blockchain's growing from that genesis-block like ice crystallizing from a nucleation-seed as the surrounding water freezes. The second-law-of-thermodynamics asserts that entropy tends to increase in the overall system, in a cumulative sense, but not necessarily throughout the entire system. Bitcoin's blockchain's removed entropy tends to imply an increase of entropy in the surrounding environment (leading to the environmental concerns with its energy-consumption). If Bitcoin's mining-difficulty were reduced and the miner-pool shrunk a lot, then Bitcoin's blockchain would have less entropy removed, but the environment would have less entropy added to it as Bitcoin's power-consumption would be less. This is by-design. For example, if you want a secure password, then you want it to have [high entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a_measure_of_password_strength https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a...), because then it's harder for an attacker to guess your password. Bitcoin's the same way, except that it doesn't start knowing the password -- instead, Bitcoin asserts that whoever controls the most entropy-removing-power (mining power) is the correct authority. So that's why [Bitcoin sets a high-enough difficulty](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty): it needs a high-enough difficulty to prevent someone from easily [faking a longer blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack).

caycep 6y ago

I probably need to read this more closely after work, but have to ask - have there been thermodynamic esp w/r to information theory/shannon entropy, information encoding properties of bitcoin?

geraldbauer 6y ago

Reminder: Bitcon is a ponzi. Learn how the investment fraud works. [1] [1]: https://github.com/openblockchains/bitcoin-ponzi https://github.com/openblockchains/bitcoin-ponzi

arbawk 6y ago
The very first line is flawed as mining companies are increasingly not selling their mined bitcoin. Why would they? They are obviously mining because they are bullish. In fact, who is selling bitcoin? Only those that don't believe it won't be an upgrade to base-layer money. Those that would call themselves bitcoiners don't want to sell it. I've never heard of a Ponzi where some people just won't sell! This page is an embarrassing collection of misinformation.

xtracto 6y ago

I'm ready to be downvoted but... nah just following the stupid memes. The article made thing an interesting point regarding how information cannot be "moved" itself but only copied and then the previous copy destroyed. I think RIAA, MPAA and other virtual goods creators could benefit from the non-fungible tokens things that are just raising as a use of the blockchain.

o_p 6y ago

So the propaganda machine is now trying to smear Bitcoin because of energy, ridiculous! I guess that the smearing it by associating it with criminlals didnt worked well enough. T

teatree 6y ago

A few questions I need help with - If bitcoin becomes a store of value / digital gold and people increasingly hold their wealth in Bitcoin countries will lose the ability control and regulate their own economy. 1) Why would any country hand over the reins of its economy to others ? India is already thinking of banning cryptocurrencies, China has similar thoughts too, if many large countries ban it how would Bitcoin sustain ? 2) US has fought wars to retain dollar as the global reserve currency. Why would the US give up this advantage ? 3) Presently, economic sanctions are used to push interests and disincentivize bad behavior. How would this play out in a world of Bitcoin ? 4) If bitcoin exists with fiat and exchange points can be controlled and blocked by governments, what's the point of Bitcoin ?

krupan 6y ago
1. They won’t hand it over. Bitcoin and it’s participants are taking it. 2. This is the same question as 1, isn’t it? Again, Bitcoin is people voting with their feet (so to speak) to take power away from governments. 3. Economic sanctions punish the common folk more than the evil governments. Bitcoin simultaneously takes power away from evil governments (see 1 and 2) and gives power to common folk. 4. I think you are alluding to one way governments can try to fight what is happening in 1, 2, and 3. If governments really try and crack down on exchanges, people will simply transact directly in Bitcoin. Those who have accumulated it pre-crackdown will purchase goods and services using Bitcoin, people who did not obtain any pre-crackdown and want it will offer goods and services to those who are offering Bitcoin. In all honesty, these extreme scenarios are far fetched. Governments all ultimately get their authority from the people. If the people are choosing Bitcoin, the governments won’t fight it for long.
arbawk 6y ago
1) Countries economies consist of the individuals within them. In India, where Bitcoin is banned, its exchange rate has since increased. Same in Pakistan. Hyperinflation occurs frequently despite a governments' best efforts. The market is the master and the government is only an actor. 2) This is probably the best piece on that point: https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoin/ https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoi.... The summary is that unlike another country's currency, Bitcoin is significantly harder to attack. 3) Economic sanctions can still exist. You still have to pay your taxes even though many avoid them. What sanctions are you referring to specifically? 4) Look into the Lightning Network to see one among various ways Bitcoin is scaling outside of exchanges. It will continue to develop in interesting ways. In the meantime, governments that enable what a growing number of people want will be rewarded while those that attempt to ban it will suffer. The incentives to do so are not in their favor (also argued in the article above).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

u678u 6y ago

One thing that always bothers me about BTC is that the whole blockchain is kept, its like half a terabyte by now. Will they ever agree to just trim off everything older than XXX days or similar? It seems hugely inefficient.

unnouinceput 6y ago
If its trimmed and only last xxx blocks are kept (there are no days in bitcoin as the article nicely puts it) then the people who have bitcoins and just hold it before the trimming happened will lose bitcoins or won't be able to spend them. Every time somebody does a transaction involving bitcoins mined from a long time ago the entire ledger is need it to see the origins of those bitcoins.
- u678u 6y ago
  OK I see, thanks for the reply. Seems like it'll remain huge for a long time yet.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Depends on what "huge" means to you. Bitcoin is 12 years old now, and it's 320 GB. I could store 2 full copies of it on what's left of my 2TB laptop SSD. In another 12 years, that is in 2033, it will be 640 GB. I'm pretty sure I'll have more than 2TB in my laptop by then; and I could fit one copy of that future blockchain on my SSD right now. Or to put it slightly differently, I can fit the whole BTC chain on a $20 USB stick.

md2020 6y ago

The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nuclear fusion takes a ton of energy, and gold is one of the heavier naturally occurring elements. As the article mentions, all physical assets can retain value because they're impossible to copy. If I give you my gold, the transfer of value is being held up by the laws of physics. You now have it, and I don't. There's no ledger keeping track of all the gold atoms in the universe, therefore it's trivial to transfer it from one part of space to another. What keeps us from having some cryptographic primitive that enforces the same thing? Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.

crazypython 6y ago
> What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? You can infinitely copy information. It's in the article.
- md2020 6y ago
  Yeah, I read the article. My question was what really prevents the existence of some cryptographic operation that would allow us to "port" the laws of physics to the digital space, so that when information moves we could enforce that the sender no longer has it and the receiver does.
  - nadahalli 6y ago
    That primitive has not been invented (maybe yet). Till then, we have Bitcoin.
samatman 6y ago
I think you would enjoy reading Claude Shannon's seminal paper on information theory. What you are proposing is profoundly silly. But to understand why it's profoundly silly is very much worthwhile! http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...

sova 6y ago

>Time is the only thing we will never be able to make more of. It is The Ultimate Resource, as Julian Simon points out. This makes Bitcoin the ultimate form of money because its issuance is directly linked to the ultimate resource of our universe: time. All things equal, BTC has a limited supply, making it unusable as a currency (but great as a deflationary store of value). I suppose the definition of "money" is less specific than "currency," but this notion of "money" goes contrary to the nomenclature of the human realm. Yes, technically anything that is tradable is "money," but then the term becomes rather meaningless. Money must be backed by a creative asset, such as an orchard or labor or technology. Time alone a currency does not make.

arbawk 6y ago
You should read the Bitcoin Standard or Layered Money to get a sense of what money is and how your notions are quite far from the truth, although delivered with feverish confidence. BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue? Bitcoin is backed by proof of work. Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. I really suggest thinking about this for a lot longer.
- sova 6y ago
  I do not disagree that BTC is a great store of value, I disagree that it is a "currency." Which is usually what the term "money" denotes. BTC in particular has long transaction verification times that are growing longer. >Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue? To be useful as a day-to-day currency there needs to be a balance between inflation and value. Currency works best when people are not encouraged to hoard it, because then the economic incentive of using money is there. If I hold on to a dollar, in <30 years it will have about half that spending power at current inflationary momentum. Thus, it is more prudent to spend the currency on assets or exchange them for necessities. If the currency itself increases in value as time goes on, the incentive to exchange it for goods and services is actually not there. Currency comes from the word current meaning flow. Hoarding something is the opposite of letting things flow. >BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. BTC is not "infinitely divisible." There is a smallest unit of BTC known as a satoshi, and transaction fees (the amount you must include to incentivize miners to actually put your transaction into a block) is already greater than the amount of BTC stored in some addresses. >Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. It may be the case that there are unsavory entities between the creative asset and the actual printed bill, but currency is at its basis rooted in the creative yield of branch or brain.

jeofken 6y ago

Are there any users of Offset [0] here on HN? [0] https://www.freedomlayer.org/offset/ https://www.freedomlayer.org/offset/

bswen 6y ago

Have fun staying poor haters

Klwohu 6y ago

I love how Bitcoin has transcended technology to become some magical blend of social cause slash liberation theology religion.

ffggvv 6y ago

Bitcoin is a pump and dump. Pump and dumps have legitimate value as long as people pay for them. This will remain true even if it goes to 200k, or 2m. In fact the higher it goes, the more of a pump and dump scheme it is. how many people would buy it (or even care about it) if they were gauranteed 100% that it would never increase in price? None. this proves its purely a speculative asset with the hope to dump the bags on some other greater fool. if there was some legitimate use then the focus would all be on stablecoins or people would love bitcoin even if it went down in value.

AzzieElbab 6y ago

Interesting article, echoing both “The scandal of money” and “Life after google” by George Gilder

SPBS 6y ago

This article was a good dive into the technical feats of bitcoin. But this fact still stands: == Traditional currency == - needs central authority + energy efficient == Bitcoin == + doesn't need central authority - energy intensive If there already is a central authority you can trust, it doesn't make sense to go through the song and dance of having a trustless currency system designed to work under adversarial conditions. Bitcoin isn't on the cusp of taking over the world, it fulfills a specific niche.

Uptrenda 6y ago

I'm so sick of these profound-sounding blog posts that take 1 million words to say precisely jack shit. Yes, the key innovation around Bitcoin was to order events. You can call this 'time' if you want. This is literally the most obvious thing you can say about the system. It's so obvious in fact that it's in the introduction section to the Bitcoin whitepaper. Here is the entire blog post written much shorter and more precisely by Satoshi: 'In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.' Not trying to be elitist but if you find this topic new then you probably also find Bitcoin's technical workings new. Since it's now more than a decade old I don't find this a very topical inclusion for a 'news' site.

qyi 6y ago
It was easier for me. With JS disabled it's just a blank page.
lionhearted 6y ago
I'm voting you up, but a respectful disagreement... I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible. Even if there's no grand takeaway. I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable. Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.
codeproject 6y ago
thank you, I am sure you save a lot of time for a lot of people. There is an interesting conversation in the movie "wall street". Bud Fox tries to make a sale pitch to Gordon Gekko. After awhile, Gordon says: Now tell me something I don't know.
pedroma 6y ago
To be fair to most people, they don't know what any of these terms mean: double-spending, peer-to-peer, distributed server, timestamp, computational proof.

dgreensp 6y ago

It's way more interesting to look at the nuance and downsides of how Bitcoin works than to merely marvel, awe-struck at the concept of a distributed ledger. It's been a few years since I was reading in-depth about Bitcoin, and I don't have references, but off the top of my head: * It's bad for the environment, "wasting" so much electricity on more and more literal busywork... or is it? Apparently it depends where your electricity is coming from (it had better be cheap if you want to make money mining!) and whether you are actually causing additional electricity to be generated or just consuming surplus, or so I've heard. * Control and power over Bitcoin is not all that distributed in practice. Mining a block would take prohibitively long for an individual, so there are mining pools where participants share in the spoils. Mining pools and exchanges have a lot of power. Just as the infrastructure of the Internet is run by big telecommunications companies whose routers talk to each other, there are various major players that make Bitcoin run, and there are occasionally decisions affecting the future and fate of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin politics, like disputes over protocols. * In theory, Bitcoin is hard to fraudulently "take over" because you'd have to have more computing power than the rest of the miners combined, but if you control mining pools, or are China or something, I believe you could do it (and no one would necessarily know?). * The rise of Bitcoin as a currency (not just a ledger/clock) whose value seems to just go up and up raises a lot of questions (IMO) about whether this is a good property of a distributed ledger system.

porknubbins 6y ago

If I ever come to HN and the top comment about Bitcoin is NOT a grumpy “I could build that in a weekend with Aws” style comment I will know the top is finally in. I think the issue is Bitcoin is no longer tech news- its a finance, or social or business topic and for some reason it inspires engineers to try to reanalyze everything from first principles to write angry comments that miss the forest for the trees. I can only imagine how something like NFTs which truly appear to be a baseless speculative mania would go over.

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xk_ 6y ago
> I can only imagine NFTs would go over The recent thread about Nyan Cat's NFT sale is an indicator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 From the comments: "The comments in this thread resemble comments dismissing BTC in 2011/2012" Welp, you were right!

debbiedowner 6y ago

Wouldn't it be great if there was a proof of work mechanism that took time, but very little energy? I think there will be a low power processor that can perform unique instructions that are expensive to simulate on CPUs and GPUs, but is amenable to hashing, and is not too expensive to buy. My guess is something neuromorphic. The first mWpowcoin could then be born. I do see a downside that people will have to buy a special chip that has little general utility, but from the rise of ASICs that must be ok. I know proof of stake exists, but clearly it isn't as popular. People like mining?

amitprayal 6y ago

Bitcoin is Tulipmania

nadahalli 6y ago

For those who already know about Bitcoin's timestamping really well, it's worth reading about the time-warp attack. David Harding wrote a great answer about it on StackExchange ages ago: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-time-warp-attack-and-how-does-it-work-in-general https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75831/what-is-ti...

ace_of_spades 6y ago

While I find decentralized digital ledgers interesting and potentially useful, I am always surprised how people think that they need to jump on bitcoin as it somehow must be the best choice for the future of money. At least to me it seems unlikely that the first feasible solution to a difficult problem is already the best. Several problems with bitcoin provide evidence for this idea. Thus, it seems like the mechanism which keeps bitcoin running is something similar to the sunk cost fallacy or framed differently attachment to a state of the ledger that is perceived as favorable by the invested community. I hope that people will realize soon enough that bitcoin should probably more be treated like a nice art project - not more, not less.